The Wolf Review - A Summary

Overview
Key Findings
Policy Recommendations
Analysis

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Overview

On 3 March 2011, Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College London published a review of vocational education. The review was commissioned by the Department for Education to explore the role of vocational education for 14-19 year olds and how it could be better aligned with the demands of the labour market.

Set within the context of widespread youth unemployment, the review suggests that the current crisis in the labour market has been entrenched by a “sclerotic, expensive, centralised and over-detailed” system of vocational education. The review suggests that, rather than being a matter of inadequate qualifications, constant experimentation with the funding, performance, and regulatory systems have been a failure.

The Wolf Review argues that the current system creates perverse incentives for students to enroll onto highly-specialised qualifications with little value to either employers or for further study. Instead, Professor Wolf suggests a renewed focus on core areas of academic study and a restriction of the Government’s role to simple monitoring and the provision of information for students to make worthwhile choices about their education.

Far from focusing solely on 14-19 year olds, the Wolf Report bears wide-reaching implications for the vocational education system as a whole. Professor Wolf is especially critical of what she terms the “bureaucratic triangle” of Sector Skills Councils, Ofqual, and awarding bodies, which exists to the exclusion of employers and education providers.

Key Findings

Labour Market Dynamics – Successive governments have created education and training policies which are at odds with changing labour markets. There is a large amount of “churn” in and out of the NEET category, reflecting a lack of satisfactory options rather than a decision to “opt out” of employment and education. Young people have been pushed into low-value education due to the lack of available jobs and there has been a misplaced assumption that unskilled jobs would be replaced by knowledge-based jobs.

Low-Value Qualifications- At least 350,000 16 to 19 year olds are on vocational courses which do not lead to higher education or meaningful work. Level 1 and 2 qualifications often come with not only low returns but negative returns on investment. Perverse incentives within the performance regime encourage providers to offer inadequate qualifications.

Core Academic Study– GCSE English and Maths are of fundamental importance yet only 45% of 15/16 year olds achieve ‘A*-C’ in both subjects. Only 4% of those who fail achieve this during 16-18 education, instead being driven towards inferior qualifications via funding incentives. There is also a misplaced emphasis on key and functional skills.

Apprenticeships- High-quality apprenticeships for young people are a rarity and the majority of growth in this area is due to adult apprenticeships. Unless policies are changed, current projections remain “highly over-optimistic”.The current content and nature of apprenticeship frameworks also fail to promote progression routes for young people as there is too little in the way of general education.

Employers- Constant qualification reform reduces market value, especially since employers tend to recognise only those qualifications that are personally familiar. Employers also prefer to target recent graduates, even when their education is surplus to the requirements of the job. Post- 16 work experience also tends to be valued more highly than formal credentials.

Awarding Bodies- Awarding bodies tend to focus on making things easier for the customer rather than assuring quality for the employer. This encourages bad practice due to fear over lost income.

Sector Skills Councils- The role of SSCs as centrally-determined organisations rather than professional bodies evolving from the labour market is an anomaly in international terms. SSCs have effectively become both designers and approvers of qualifications, engaging with employers on qualifications rather than general learning provision. SSCs also have an “impossible task” in trying to reflect all the concerns and requirements of the economy.

National Occupational Standards- NOS were invented to increase the labour market relevance of qualifications but have focused on those in employment rather than the vocational education needed to gain employment in the first place. The operation of NOS means that vocational qualifications are too closely tied to current occupational practice, proving irrelevant for entry to a rapidly-changing economy.

Ofqual- The fact that Ofqual sets both the criteria for regulation and is responsible for carrying out regulation compromises its independence. Ofqual is overly-focused on comparing written documentation, excluding vital sector and subject expertise.

Qualifications & Credit Framework- The QCF maintains formal equivalencies of “level” and “credit” which do not translate to the labour market. It also contributes to a decline in status for many awarding bodies, who can no-longer claim a particular qualification as their own. The breakdown of learning into individual units also comes with large operational costs.

Performance & Funding- There is an over-reliance on individual qualifications and registered qualifications achieved as the basis for performance measures and funding allocations. This incentivises colleges to offer qualifications which are easy to achieve rather than offering coherent programmes of study linked to the local labour market.

Policy & Accountability- The burgeoning complexity of public bodies responsible for skills has lead to confusion over policy decisions, lines of authority, increased costs, lack of transparency, and responsiveness. Responsibility for the nature and content of qualifications is wrested away from ministers and deprived of accountability.

Policy Recommendations

The Wolf Review comes with 27 separate policy recommendations, including:-

Funding should follow the student rather than the qualification (applying the per-student basis post-16 as well as pre-16).
GCSE English and Maths should be a compulsory part of post-16 education for all those who fail to achieve A*-C.
Inclusion of qualifications for 16 to 19 year olds onto the QCF should no longer be obligatory.
Regulation should move away from individual qualification accreditation to awarding body oversight.
High quality vocational qualifications should be identified by the Government as part of its responsibility for providing reliable information.
Further Education teachers should be allowed to teach in schools through the recognition of QTLS (the FE equivalent of Qualified Teacher Status).
Local employers should be involved in quality assurance and assessment activity.
Awarding bodies should demonstrate, when seeking recognition, how employers are involved directly in development and specification of qualifications.
The Department for Education and BIS should work more closely on apprenticeships to increase efficiency, control unit costs and drive out unnecessary brokerage costs.
Ways should be explored to reimburse local employers with core funds for supplying work experience opportunities for 16 to 18 year olds, including internships.
The future role of NOS and SSCs in education and training for young people should be put out to consultation.

Analysis

The Government is yet to respond to the recommendations of the Wolf review, although the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, has already welcomed it as “brilliant and ground-breaking”. Much of the content, such as the focus on core academic knowledge, reflects what has already been said in the Schools White Paper and the ongoing review of the national curriculum. The review’s findings are also overtly critical of the past two decades of policy and the development of “complex, expensive and counterproductive structures” around education and skills (most of which were the product of the Labour Government). For these reasons we can expect the Wolf Review to play an influential part in the future development of education and skills policy.

It would be difficult to argue that the Wolf Review was not needed given the current scale of youth employment and squeeze on higher education finances. The Review also closely parallels reforms in both FE and HE; moving the skills system closer to the labour market, restricting the Government’s role to monitoring and intelligence, and using individual private return as a measure of quality. Whilst most of the general principles of the Wolf Review were to be expected, some of the specific details such as the importance placed on work experience and the creation of a level playing field between schools and FE professionals were unexpected. Professor Wolf’s sceptical opinions on apprenticeship growth are also at a disjuncture with the Government’s current rhetoric.

The Wolf Review leaves various policy issues to be resolved, not least the difficulty of turning all 27 recommendations into a coherent system of reform, undoing previous legislation in the process. The tension between specialism and “core academic content” needs to be clarified in a way that does not restrict the curriculum too much (with consequences for student motivation). The Wolf Review attributes a larger role for employers in assessing quality and offering work experience but there is insufficient detail on the exact nature of this involvement or of how to ensure buy-in at a local level. The enhanced role of information is significantly compromised by the cuts which are occurring to the Connexions advice service. Finally, Professor Wolf’s broad critique of previous policy and its failure to meet the needs of a changing labour market overlooks the efficacy of recently abolished schemes such as the Future Job’s Fund or the Educational Maintenance Allowance.

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